Urgent: whiplash experts wanted

The Ministry of Justice is pushing hard, it emerged this week, to have whiplash-assessing medical panels up and running before the end of the year.

As with all its other policies, Paul Edwards of Hill Dickonsin suggested to Post Magazine, the current government is keen on the Medical Panels solution to whiplash “because it’s quite hard for anyone to object to.”

Edwards noted that it remains unclear who is going to pay for all these new assessors, whose attendance fees, productivity bonuses, and intensive one-day Whiplash Expert training courses will, Bankstone News can only suppose, inevitably carry costs.

Logically, perhaps, it should be insurers, in the same way they’ve stepped in to fund police anti-fraud activities. But might this attract unworthy suspicions that assessors’ judgement could somehow be influenced by their source of income?

In reality, of course, each one of the several thousand medical professionals called up to staff the Medical Panels will be scrupulously objective in the manner in which they look applicants in the eye and ask them in a very serious voice whether or not they really do have whiplash – or whether they are simply claiming to, in the cynical knowledge that there’s no real way of telling.

Whether initial appearances before the judging panel will include – not only whatever verbal and physical prodding and probing assessors are allowed to do before claimants cries of real or feigned pain become insufferably loud – but also lie detector tests remained unclear at the time of writing.

Or maybe claimants, like the sadly afflicted/persistently shamming author of this deeply self-pitying Telegraph article, will simply be “treated like meat” until they go away.

Perhaps the simple prospect of appearing before a panel will be sufficient to put off all those shameless would be whiplash winners.

“You do realise, do you Mrs Paphillipidedeles, that if you persist in this ridiculous pretence I shall have no other choice but to subject you to a protracted series of uncomfortably intrusively but ultimately inconclusive medical examinations?”